Is it time for British ministers to give up on Northern Ireland, at least in the sense of trying to create some power-sharing government, as they have been doing off and on for the past 25 years? Nobody should blame Tony Blair for trying to achieve some lasting settlement. Enormous strides have been made: the agreement by the Dublin government to drop its claim to the North; the acceptance on all sides that Ulster's ultimate fate should be decided by the votes of its inhabitants; above all, the great reduction in violence. Almost all the historic questions, about who should govern Ireland and how, have been settled. Yet the unionists will not govern alongside ministers who, in effect, have a private army at their disposal. The IRA will not disarm because it does not believe that Catholics can rely for protection on what they regard as a sectarian police force. To this impasse, the leaders of three nations, with all the ingenuity and expertise at their disposal, have been unable to find a solution. Behind all the talking and horse-trading, Ulster's political leaders remain as intransigent as ever about the one thing that really matters: their willingness to trust each other.

And that is the nub of it. The closer an Ulster executive comes, the more implausible it seems that its leading members could ever work together. Northern Ireland's politics are those of an underdeveloped country; nowhere else, outside Africa, are parties organised on such exclusively tribal lines. What are David Trimble's views on welfare or education or the NHS? What are Gerry Adams's views on disability benefits or Martin McGuinness's on student loans? Are these people progressives, reactionaries or Third Wayers? The answer is that we do not know, because their political careers are based entirely on sectarian positioning. They have never taken a decision about a school, a hospital, a social security benefit, even a bus shelter. Remove "the Irish problem", and they would have nothing to say. These past three years have been their apotheosis: peace prizes, international conferences, White House receptions. Journalists hang upon their every cough and facial twitch. Let their brows darken or their voices harden for an instant and prime ministers, presidents, secretaries of state and US senators drop everything and converge upon them, like anxious parents ready to soothe an exceptionally fragile infant.

If ever the power-sharing executive does get under way, be sure that, at regular intervals, it will be deemed in imminent danger of collapse. Otherwise, the likes of Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness would be nothing more than minor ministers of an obscure, offshore European province, no more worthy of notice than the Bavarian minister of agriculture or the tourism minister of a Swiss canton. The habit of living in the international limelight, once begun, is hard to break.

The danger of the peace process has always been that, far from healing sectarian divisions, it entrenches them. It brings to the centre of the stage the hardliners on both sides. Sinn Fein, once seemingly a marginal force in Irish politics, now flourishes both North and South. No wonder its leaders are in no hurry to go back to the armed struggle. Protracted talk suits almost all parties, since nobody, least of all Mr Blair, wants to take responsibility for declaring that enough is enough and so run the risk of plunging the province back into violence. Nevertheless, if the Good Friday Agreement allows no further way forward, that risk must eventually be taken. Northern Ireland cannot live indefinitely in political limbo. Sooner or later, Mr Blair has to try a plan B. And that must involve rebuilding Ulster's democracy from the bottom up.

In other words, as Simon Jenkins has outlined in the Times, it means devolving real power - over education, health, social services, industry and so on - to local councils. Here, genuine power-sharing, to an extent, already exists. Nationalists or republicans are stronger in some areas, various shades of unionist in others. But there is every sign that, given issues of true political substance to grapple with, the two communities can work together and go beyond the endless and tedious repetitions of sectarian principle with which we are all too familiar. The obstacle to local devolution lies not so much in Ulster as in Whitehall, which, on the principle that one should never act justly now for fear of raising expectations that one will act still more justly in future, may fear that councils in England and Wales would soon demand similar powers.

But something new has to be tried in Northern Ireland, and this solution, with all its risks, is surely the best available.

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